Well you know for a start Africa- When you take a young Parisian student who has never left Paris, who's studying at the Medical Faculty, and that you take him and send him to black Africa, and in particular, that you leave him alone in a region as big as half of France to be that area's doctor, it's quite a change, it's rather surprising. It really was something very surprising. Because during that time I sometimes- At first I went to black Africa, I left with the Dakar expedition, where we were very badly welcomed, so we left again. Afterwards I went to Cameroon, then in the north, in Chad. And I was the doctor of a region which was more or less as big as half of France, with my two years of studying medicine. In other words, you couldn't ask me much. And it really was an extraordinary life- It was something completely new. And there, I learned a lot.
And did you have any problems with the Africans? Or did you not encounter any in the end? You were the doctor. Did you have very natural relationships? What I mean is that at the time you didn't feel any opposition?
No, at the time there weren't any. No I was the doctor. So there was a village- I was the doctor for both the battalion infantry which had set up camp in the north, just north of the Chad lake, and at the same time for the region, meaning a village. Every morning I went to the village to do my visits. It was very picturesque. That was also something, coming from the 'Hopitaux de Paris', from the latest surgery techniques of the Saint-Antoine hospital and landing there where I was expected to run a small dispensary where women would come show me their troubles, and where I tried to spot the syphilitic cases because it was very important for the troops- It was a rather different job.
And for example did you have everything you needed in terms of medicine in order to help at least a little?
We mainly had- I remember that there was a captain doctor with an incredible accent from the South of France, whom I replaced. He was very happy to see me arrive because he'd been there six months, and he was fed up. He said to me: Can you imagine, that here, there are no white women! So he was very happy to arrive and to leave. He explained to me what I should and shouldn't do: in the morning you do your- you treat the soldiers. Afterwards in the afternoon, you go to the dispensary and you treat the civilians. And on that note, he left, too happy!
You really learned medicine on the job.
I really didn't learn much about medicine. You know medicine, soldier medicine isn't real medicine. What's wrong with you? - My head hurts Lieutenant. Take an aspirin tablet. That was essentially it, medicine. When there was something more serious, we would send it to the hospital. But there, miles away from anything in Chad, you needed two days to get to the hospital in Fort Lamy.

François Jacob (1920-2013) was a French biochemist whose work has led to advances in the understanding of the ways in which genes are controlled. In 1965 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with Jacque Monod and André Lwoff, for his contribution to the field of biochemistry. His later work included studies on gene control and on embryogenesis. Besides the Nobel Prize, he also received the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science for 1996 and was elected a member of the French Academy in 1996.

Michel Morange is a professor of Biology and Director of the Centre Cavaillès of History and Philosophy of Science at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. After having obtained a Bachelor in biochemistry and two PhDs, one in Biochemistry, the other in History and Philosophy of Science, he went on to join the research unit of Molecular Genetics headed by François Jacob, in the Department of Molecular Biology at the Pasteur Institute, Paris. Together with Olivier Bensaude, he discovered that Heat Shock Proteins are specifically expressed on the onset of the mouse zygotic genome activation. Since then he has been working on the properties of Heat Shock Proteins, their role in aggregation and on the regulation of expression of these proteins during mouse embryogenesis. He is the author of 'A History of Molecular Biology' and 'The Misunderstood Gene'.